Federal and State Departments of Transportation (DOT) and the law enforcement agencies of the various states inspect many commercial heavy vehicles annually. In the past, most such inspections have been performed at weigh stations located on interstate highways. Trucks passing the weigh station must pull over, and wait in line to be weighed and possibly inspected. Inspections on selected vehicles are performed based on weight violations or random sampling. Because of the sheer number of trucks operating on U.S. highways, only a fraction of the entire trucking fleet is inspected each year.
These roadside vehicle inspections are performed to ensure that the vehicle is in proper working order with all safety related equipment, such as the lights, in operative condition. Also, the driver must have the proper credentials and be in a physical and mental condition to safely operate the vehicle that he or she is driving. The inspection programs are predicated on the philosophy that any problem with the vehicle or driver has the potential to increase the probability of an accident and a possible injury or loss of life to a person using the roadway.
There have been screening systems and waiver inspection systems developed that have received support from regulatory agencies and the trucking industry, to make inspections more efficient. Such systems attempt to reduce the number of trucks potentially needing inspections, by removing vehicles from selected operators meeting defined criteria from the pool of vehicles potentially needing inspections.
One such screening system is based on a review of a trucking company's safety performance. If an operator can show that they have a good safety and compliance record, and are properly permitted and insured, the operator may be eligible to participate in the screening system. When an eligible operator enrolls in the program, specific equipment is added to their fleet vehicles. At about 300 weigh stations in the U.S., the added vehicle equipment communicates with the weigh station as the vehicle approaches. The weigh station component automatically reviews the operator's credentials, and if the operator is approved to bypass the weigh station, then a message to that effect is sent to the driver. The government regulatory agencies like this approach, because it reduces the number of trucks entering the weigh stations, enabling the regulatory agencies to focus their inspection efforts on vehicle operators who have not been prequalified. The trucking industry likes this approach because minimizing idle time while waiting in line for an inspection increases operating efficiency.
While this screening system has worked for years, it has several flaws. First, the equipment is dated and will soon need to be replaced. Equipping each participating weigh station with the required equipment costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Also, marginal operators, who don't want to be inspected because their equipment would likely fail the inspection, generally know the physical locations of the weigh stations, and can actively plan their routes to bypass these fixed facilities.
It would be desirable to provide method and apparatus that enables the vehicles of enrolled operators to be efficiently prescreened, so that regulatory or enforcement agencies can focus their time and effort performing inspections on vehicles that may be statistically more likely to be operating with one or more safety conditions that place the public at risk. By increasing the efficiency of the selection of vehicles to either bypass inspection or to be inspected, the inspection programs can be expected to have an enhanced effectiveness of improving roadway safety. Also, regulatory and enforcement agencies might then devote more resources to preventing the marginal operators from avoiding inspections.